Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women
Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Copyright Date: 2008
Published by: Fordham University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx
Pages: 200
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wzxbx
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Book Info
Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women
Book Description:

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism. Beyond the simple existence of an unacknowledged tradition of uncanny literature by women, Scare Tactics makes a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism. Paying attention to these overlooked authors helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-4949-7
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.2
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. vii-x)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.3
  4. Introduction: The Unacknowledged Tradition
    Introduction: The Unacknowledged Tradition (pp. 1-25)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.4

    “The Premonition” is a strange little tale of the supernatural published by an American woman named Lurana W. Sheldon in Godey’s Lady’s Magazine in 1896. Within the tale, a new bride, Evelyn, dreams weird and lurid dreams about her artist husband, Armand. As she sleeps, ghostly women visit her and reveal the cause of their demise: they were all models poisoned by Armand so that he could paint scenes of their deaths. Forewarned by these spectral sisters of her own impending fate, Evelyn, upon awaking, questions her husband more closely concerning his past. Armand, however, dismisses her concerns as simply...

  5. 1. The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton
    1. The Ghost in the Parlor: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna M. Hoyt, and Edith Wharton (pp. 26-55)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.5

    Murder, incest, bigamy, suicide, child abuse, rape, and revenge from beyond the grave—the American version of the Female Gothic trades in the sensational, uncanny, and grotesque and foregrounds the forms of violence to which women were subject in patriarchal culture as fully as its British counterpart. One wouldn’t know it, however, based on the minimal attention it has received from contemporary scholars. Indeed, the body of literature on the Female Gothic, with its overwhelming emphasis on Radcliffe, Shelley, and the Brontës, might lead one to believe that only British women participated in this tradition—at least until late into...

  6. 2. Queer Haunting Spaces: Madeline Yale Wynne and Elia Wilkinson Peattie
    2. Queer Haunting Spaces: Madeline Yale Wynne and Elia Wilkinson Peattie (pp. 56-81)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.6

    Given that the nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood” structured a female world bounded by kitchen hearth and nursery (Smith-Rosenberg 13), it is not surprising that, in the writing of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century women, the particular setting invested with the most affective energy is the space of the home. As numerous commentators on the Female Gothic have noted—and in keeping with Gilbert and Gubar’s now-canonical analysis of nineteenth-century literature by women more generally—familiar domestic interiors in the Gothic transform into confining sites of mental and psychological peril.¹

    Ghost stories, perhaps more than any other class of story, are preoccupied with...

  7. 3. Ghosts of Progress: Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton
    3. Ghosts of Progress: Alice Cary, Mary Noailles Murfree, Mary Austin, and Edith Wharton (pp. 82-104)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.7

    As we have seen so far, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American women writers made frequent use of Gothic conventions as a veiled or double-voiced mode of critique targeting gender codes that disempowered women. The haunting female figures introduced by Spofford, Hoyt, Stowe, and Wharton in Chapter 1 call attention to the ways in which women are subject to various forms of violence in patriarchal culture. The haunting spaces of Wynne and Peattie addressed in Chapter 2 foreground the gendering of space itself and the ways in which women are situated and defined by social expectations that entail the surrendering of autonomy....

  8. 4. Familial Ghosts: Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
    4. Familial Ghosts: Louise Stockton, Olivia Howard Dunbar, Edith Wharton, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Georgia Wood Pangborn, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (pp. 105-135)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.8

    Either explicitly or implicitly, ghost stories are always about violence. The ghost is the uncanny afterimage of sorrow, pain, and tragedy. If there is a ghost, someone has died or something has gone out of the world, and if the ghost walks, something has been left undone, a crime needs to be redressed, or a story needs to be told. In the hands of American Female Gothicists, the ghost is put to work to tell these unhappy tales—and while the stories occasionally have happy endings, they are seldom untinctured by sorrow. The stories addressed so far in this study...

  9. 5. Ghosts of Desire: Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull
    5. Ghosts of Desire: Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, and Helen Hull (pp. 136-171)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.9

    As I note briefly in the last chapter, recent studies of nineteenth-century American culture have begun to call into question the accepted wisdom of “separate spheres” for men and women. This is not to say that cultural expectations for men and women didn’t differ, but rather that they didn’t function in some monolithic way uninflected by other factors such as race, class, geographical region, religion, and occupation. Furthermore, as Amy Kaplan has noted, the boundaries between the “spheres” need to be considered as permeable, “demonstrating that the private feminized space of the home both infused and bolstered the male arena...

  10. 6. Ghostly Returns: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Daskam Bacon
    6. Ghostly Returns: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Atherton, and Josephine Daskam Bacon (pp. 172-193)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.10

    In attending to these ghost stories by nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American women, we are eavesdropping on a conversation of sorts—an exchange among women in dialogue with the larger tradition of American and British supernaturalism more generally. As I have periodically pointed out, these were women who knew each other’s writing and in some instances corresponded with or knew each other personally. Both Rose Terry Cooke and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, for example, wrote appreciatively of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work and she reciprocated their praise. Both likely knew herSir Rohan’s Ghostand her short supernatural fiction. Ward sought advice on...

  11. Coda: The Decline of the American Female Gothic
    Coda: The Decline of the American Female Gothic (pp. 194-198)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.11

    The overriding premise of this study has been that between roughly 1850 and 1930 , American women, often in dialogue with one another, produced a coherent body of supernatural fiction that used conventions of the Gothic to express specifically female anxieties and desires. In story after story, authors including Spofford, Stowe, Austin, Gilman, Brown, Bacon, Pangborn, Wharton, Freeman, Glasgow, Hull, and many others put ghosts to work, so to speak, in the service of women, demonstrating that what women feared most was not the unknown but what one may consider as the “terrors of the usual”—that is, the roles...

  12. Works Cited
    Works Cited (pp. 199-218)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.12
  13. Index
    Index (pp. 219-228)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13wzxbx.13
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